Shootout
by s.ryn
Summary: Mary Shannon had been in this situation countless times; gun at the ready, finger on trigger, feeling every beat of her heart to take down her enemy, her prey. But this time, her target was Marshall Mann. And he was going down. M/M NOT what you think


**A/N:** I need to stop having wild IPS visions at odd hours of the night, but it's two in the morning, and here's another work of insanity for you.

Word of advice: things aren't what they seem. -enigmatic music-

----

Mary Shannon had been in this situation countless times; gun at the ready, finger on trigger, feeling every beat of her heart and using the pulsing frenzied thump of her blood to track her enemy, _her prey_, to put a bullet through his or, occasionally, her head before she herself was shot. But this time, her target was Marshall Mann.

He was going down.

----

How it started, she forgot, but where it got her was pushed up hard against a wooden monolith in the hot Albuquerque sun. Her fingers gripped the gun in her hands, her only weapon because they hadn't let her carry another one strapped to her boot. Her breath came raggedly-- they'd been at this for a while; she knew she'd already hit him in the thigh, heard the grunt of pain upon impact even if she ducked down too fast to see him wince. In all honesty, she was disappointed more of her shots didn't hit him.

_Damn, I'm not used to this piece-of-shit gun. Gonna take some getting used to, but he's using the same kind, and it'll throw him off, too._

The thought brought a sadistic grin to her lips, an image of Marshall crouched behind one of the tall wooden columns or boards that stood haphazardly about, cursing himself for being so off target because the shots he got off with his Glock had a spread of about four inches, and _what is wrong with this gun, I can't get a shot within three feet of her._

They were both aiming for the places where it would hurt most; the chest, the back, the abdomen. Maybe a thigh or foot to handicap the other, but the prize was in the kill.

Mary peered quickly from her position behind the huge wooden pole, riddled with the marks of past battles, to see the stack of hay behind which Marshall had taken cover about one hundred and fifty feet away. She took deep breaths to calm herself down, to focus, and felt the sweat sliding down her back and gathering on her forehead. _Of all places to have a shootout, Albuquerque. Damn._ Feeling particularly like a savage—not an unpleasant feeling—she wiped her face with a sleeve of her dirty, muddy green t-shirt, then wiped her sweaty hands on her cargo pants. _I look like a cadet in these hiking boots_,she thought and savored the control and strength she felt without having to sport heels and fitted jeans.

"Hey, moron!" she called brashly. "You still alive?!" Baiting the rattlesnake, _oh, this is delicious. _Her heart was pounding loudly in her ears from running and dodging, but also from the sheer danger, excitement, and fear of a gunfight; emotions in their purest form as her survival instinct kicked in, driven by adrenaline. Though she didn't like putting her life in danger, would not throw herself into an exchange of bullets for no good reason, she had to admit the appeal in experiencing the raw action of battle. And this, against familiar, kind Marshall, just upped her ante.

A pause, then, "Been better!"

"Well, then, how's about you surrender and come out with your hands up, Cowboy Cop?!" she was getting irritable and impatient, fingers sliding longingly along the trigger and tensing for her next planned move. _If he'd just step out, I could shoot him, then get home and into a shower…_

Instead of rising to her challenge, he shot back, "'Cowboy Cop'?! Is that the best you can come up with!? Don't disappoint me, now!" While he had been talking and probably nursing his thigh, however, Mary took off, head down and gun at the ready to return fire, across twenty feet of open space toward the nearest thing that looked like it could protect her—a broken-down piece of brick wall, no taller than four feet and no wider than three. In her head, calculations: _another hundred feet or so, but I don't want to get too close. He knows my fight, and I know his. Too familiar to get too close, have to be farther away so it's harder for him to see what I'm doing… but close enough to have accuracy. Why can't he just be a gentleman and just step out and let me shoot him, for the love of God?! _

Mary stayed silent, unwilling to give away her new position, but Marshall continued on as if they _weren't_ trying to shoot each other, "You know, cowboys had absolutely nothing to do with law enforcement. There were strictly…" Her mind blocked out his droning, and she ducked as quietly as she could thirty feet closer behind a barrel of water.

Ten more feet of the zigzag she was making across the sand with desert heat beating on her shoulders, and she was secure behind some sort of fence with a thin sheet of metal leaning against it. She looked at the next possible routes she could take; to the left about fifty feet in a southeastern direction was a well rising out of the ground that would give her good protection when she started to shoot. But about seventy feet to her right in a southwestern direction was a length of wooden fence that would _not_ provide good protection but would bring her in closer to Marshall, improving her accuracy with the foreign gun in her hands. She could choose to run across fifty feet of open space where she'd be a sitting duck if he fired at her to insured safety or across seventy-five feet of open space to questionable safety but better chance of getting the job done.

It took all of a second for her to decide, and she was almost halfway to the fence in a head-down sprint when she realized what was missing; Marshall had stopped talking, stopped spouting useless minutia. _Damn. The one time I need him to keep it up... Damn._

The moment she had the thought, his first shot hit the dirt two feet in front of her feet with a little _poof_.

_That went to Hell in a handbasket_, and she gave up her run to stand tall against the U.S. Marshal who had stepped out from behind the hay and was firing without mercy at her.

She fired back, and it became a game of who-can-get-control-of-the-gun-first.

She took the first shot to the abdomen, on her left side near her pelvis, and her left knee buckled in response to the unexpected pain; she went down, kneeling in the dirt, one hand grasping her side and the other on the gun still aimed at Marshall.

And then—seeing her waver for a a second in pain, then go down in the dirt, Marshall Mann hesitated for a moment, just a moment, and that was all she needed.

Their eyes met, and he knew he lost because he was still in his moment of off-balance, and her finger already had the trigger halfway pulled.

His body jerked backwards and hit the haystack when the shot connected, and he looked down to see bright red spread right through his shirt in the middle of his chest.

----

"You alright?" Mary asked, pulling Marshall up from his half-sitting, half-kneeling position against the haystack.

"Maybe we should do something with less painful consequences next time," he replied, massaging his chest and thigh and getting his hands red in the process. "Paintballing seems a sport for the young and, uh, masochistic."

She was rubbing the ache away from her side where had he hit her, shoving the paintball gun into a pocket of her cargo pants. "You're only saying that because you lost," was the mocking retort, along with a triumphant glance at the place in the middle of his once-white shirt that was hit. "I told you I could beat you in a firefight."

"That hardly counted as a firefight, and this is the first time in all the times we've played that you've beaten me. Dragging me out here all the time to try to beat the paintball master, then getting beaten. Obsessing over getting beaten. Dragging me out to beat you at paintball again. Sad, sad cycle, Mare."

"Shut up," was her witty reply, following him as they started to trek from the field back toward the office of Albuquerque's Hinkle Super Challenge Paintball to return their gear. "I told you I could beat you, though, and I did. Broke your perfect never-been-hit-during-paintball-record. Now you get to buy me lunch."

"That was the deal," was the too-cheerful reply. "I'm going to bruise. Again."

"I don't get it…" Mary said suddenly, stopping abruptly just as the office was in view.

Marshall stopped, too, slightly thrown off at her sudden change in thought but asked patiently, "What?"

"…that was _easy._" A long pause as he waited. "You missed me by a _lot_. You're usually a much better… shot with a paintball gun…"

Marshall just said, deadpan, "I know, I'm amazing. Miraculous Marshall, what they used to call him." But she was not deterred.

"…so easy… like you were… _letting me_…"

At this, Marshall grinned, showing all his teeth and reducing his eyes to slits of blue. He put his hand on her shoulder, leaned down so he was eye-to-eye with her, and said deliberately with the same insane grin, "Happy birthday, Mary."


End file.
